


'Cause I'm Workin', 'til it's Hurtin'

by Pollydoodles



Series: 50 Ways to Meet Your Lover [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-06-23 13:03:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19701940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pollydoodles/pseuds/Pollydoodles
Summary: Undercover. It's easy, right ?





	'Cause I'm Workin', 'til it's Hurtin'

“Hey, hey, Darcy-” 

Darcy glanced up briefly as Luis tapped at her arm in rapid succession, before looking back at the magazine she was flipping through. The man bounced on his toes next to her, practically vibrating as he kept on tapping at her elbow. 

“‘Sup, Luis?” She eventually answered without actually looking up at the man stood at her shoulder, absentminded and mainly wondering if she’d suit $200 leather pants or no. Her ass said yes, her bank account was less sure. 

“Darcy-” 

The bouncing intensified.

“You seen the new guy already, right?”

At this, she flickered her eyes up and across all ten foot of the small store, to where the aforementioned new guy was stood. Mop in one hand, he glowered from behind a thick curtain of dark hair as he nominally moved it from side to side. The one customer they’d managed to attract in the last hour had scuttled past him with a frightened look and right back out the door two minutes later. 

“Yup,” she said, popping the ‘p’ hard whilst refocusing on the magazine and flipping another page.

“But Darcy, he’s like-”

“Don’t say it,” she murmured, eyes and finger both tracing the first line of an article about the merits of lip gloss versus lipstick, and what 2018 might have in store from Maybelline. 

“-The Winter Soldier.”

The girl sighed in a resigned sort of fashion, shutting the magazine as she sat back in her seat, and bringing one foot up to rest on the edge of the counter. She fixed the man at her side with a long, slow look, before wrinkling her nose and twisting in her seat toward him. 

“That’s not the Winter Soldier,” she said, carefully. “That’s-” she sighed again, shaking her head slightly to herself before she continued. “-that’s ‘Chucky’.” Darcy inverted her commas in the air around the new guy’s name, and Luis’ face was the very picture of confusion. She could practically count the cogs as they whirred in front of her, eyes darting between her stoic expression and the man at the other end of the store. 

“I see his metal arm, Darce, it’s right there,” Luis said frankly, his own left arm rising to point down the store. Darcy slapped it back down to his side.

“Luis,” she said, twisting in her seat to look at him properly, fingers gripping his wrist with an ever-increasing pressure that had the man glancing between her blue eyes and her hand with something of a nervous energy, despite his wide grin. “I don’t think you can see a metal arm.”

She nodded, nice and slow as she spoke, and Luis slowly began nodding along with her, his smile widening further and further until his mouth opened again and-

“Nah, I totally see it. It’s like, all shiny and he’s rolled up his sleeve and everything on that arm so it’s not even like a little bit of metal arm-”

His next words were muffled by Darcy’s hand, though he gamely kept going. She stood up, slipping off the stool she’d been perched on, magazine slipping from her lap to the floor and backing him up against the coffee machine, hand still pressed firmly across his mouth. 

“Luis.” 

She smiled, and she could feel him smile in response behind her palm, even if she couldn’t actually see it. Darcy pushed back a large mass of dark hair with her free hand, shoving curls behind one ear as she contemplated her next move. She tilted her head to one side, and smiled again. 

“Luis,” she began again, slowly. “The thing is, both you and I know that’s the Winter Soldier. He’s more obvious than… Than, well, than the Winter Soldier moonlighting as a convenience store busboy.” They both paused and looked over her shoulder at the other end of the store, tall, dark and murderous glaring back at them with one hand wrapped tight about the mop handle. Luis waved.

“He’s undercover,” Darcy said hurriedly, turning back to face him with her hand still over the man’s mouth. He mumbled against her palm, breath warm and wet, Darcy tilting her head to one side as she tried to figure out what he was saying, before realising there was no way she could interpret him and keep her hand pressed over his face. 

“Why is he undercover?” Luis burst out as she dropped her hand. Darcy shrugged. 

“I don’t know,” she said chancing another quick look over her shoulder again at the man, who was swinging the mop over the floor in a wide circle, presumably in an attempt to look busy. His eyeline, however, was firmly fixed through the storefront windows and across the parking lot. She turned back to Luis. “It’s not like anyone tells me anything in this place.”

“But you’re the manager,” he said, plaintively. “You’re supposed to, like, be in charge of everything.”

“I’m the manager because I have a half-finished college degree over your criminal record.” She paused. “And because Baskin Robbins turned you down again.”

“And Chuck-E-Cheese,” Luis said mournfully. 

“And Chuck-E-Cheese,” Darcy agreed. “But that one was on you, and you know why.”

Luis tossed her a boyish grin in response, half-shrugging his shoulders at the same time. The door pinged, signalling a customer, and the pair of them turned in response to it. A large man, all broad shoulders and tapered waist, stood somewhat sheepishly in the doorway. He had a baseball cap jammed onto his head, aviators covering his eyes. 

“Ah,” he said loudly, and Darcy and Luis glanced at each other silently, each from the corner of their eye. “Chucky, my friend, how are you doing?”

With that, he covered the few steps between the door and their new busboy, slinging an arm around the other man’s shoulders and drawing him close, a whispered conversation ensuing - nothing of which Darcy could catch, but the Winter Soldier’s grip on his mop grew progressively tighter until she heard a sharp splintering of wood. 

“So that’s-”

“Captain America, yeah,” she answered, stood at Luis’ side, the pair of them leaning back against the broken coffee machine sat forlornly behind them, arms folding across their selves in one synchronised movement, staring across at what was probably the world’s least convincing undercover mission. 

“Huh,” Luis said, half under his breath. “You’d think maybe the Avengers would be, I don’t know, better at this undercover stuff. I mean, like, I know Scotty can shrink himself all tiny and stuff, but don’t they got real spies?”

“You think the guy who turns up to his day job in red, white and blue spandex would be good undercover?” She replied out of the corner of her mouth, and tried not to look at the way the Winter Soldier’s Levi’s were slung low on his hips.

“Naw, but like … Black Widow,” Luis responded and, sneaking a quick peek at his face, Darcy concluded that he too was persuading himself out of staring at the sliver of stomach that was winking at them from the other end of the store. 

“The woman who released every secret file of the world’s most secret government agency onto the internet for anyone to read?” Darcy murmured, her head tilting to one side as she spoke, all the better for taking in both men at the other end of the store. Luis tilted his head the same way.

“I guess you got a point,” Luis agreed in a low voice, forehead practically touching her shoulder as he bent. 

“I think the Avengers are past undercover now,” she concluded, thinking of Thor and the total devastation he’d managed to wreak in New Mexico in just a few days. And then again in London. And, in fact, in general whenever she’d seen him. Especially in Jane’s kitchen. Cook he could, but it came with a helluva lot of mess as well. “Pretty sure they can just turn up and hit things at this point if they want.”

“I think maybe someone needs to tell them, you know?” Luis answered. “Or, like,” he brightened. “-they could hire people who can actually do the jobs they’re supposed to be undercover at - like us.”

\---------

Darcy was unpacking what felt like a million boxes of animal crackers, when the world went dark. Freezing with a multipack of crackers in one hand and a somewhat blunt packing knife in the other, she swallowed hard and turned slowly on her heel to find the Winter Soldier - her mind helpfully auto-corrected the name to ‘the new guy’, possibly out of an innate sense of self-preservation - towering over her. 

She found herself struggling to form words, an awkward mix of abject concern and a deeply strong interest in the way dark stubble graced the sharp angles of his face. Catching her breath in the back of her throat, Darcy focused on the blue of his eyes as the man looked down at her. 

“Uh-”

“I broke the mop,” he announced, with a startling lack of remorse colouring his voice as he spoke, handing it over with a piece in each hand. Darcy stared; first at the splintered wood in front of her, and then up at the man looming over her. 

“Do I.. Do I wanna know how?” She said slowly, registering quite how thoroughly it had been broken as she spoke, and taking a half-step back from the man subconsciously. It was his turn to look down at the shattered cleaning implement, half in each hand, considering it before replying. 

“I…” He hesitated, dark hair falling into clear blue eyes before he glanced at her through that curtain of hair. “I cleaned very hard.”

Both Darcy’s eyebrows shot upwards before she could stop herself reacting. She coughed hard to cover the movement, reasoning that six foot and change of metal and muscle might not take too kindly to it, especially seeing what he’d managed to do to the mop. And that hadn’t even given him sass. 

“O-kay,” she trilled in what she knew was a too-high-for-normality tone of voice. “Well, we keep another one behind the counter, so we’ll just throw that in the trash and-”

Darcy had turned to push the swing door from the store cupboard, talking over her shoulder at the man behind as she did so, head snapping around as the door swung open full under her hand. She stopped dead in the middle of the doorway, jaw open and the door returning to smack her hard in the shoulder. 

The store was… Devastated would be putting it mildly. Decimated would be severely understating the scenario. Totalled would be closer and yet, still not quite the right word. 

The shelves were toppled, not a one left standing upright, produce spilled across the linoleum. The front door hung from its hinges, and not a single pane of glass remained intact in the whole store front. The coffee machine, kept behind the counter and already battered through years of overuse, was smoking gently. It looked suspiciously like bullet holes decorated the side of the till. 

“Oh, hell no,” she muttered under her breath, and spun on her heel to face the man behind her again. She took three steps, enough to bring her face to chest with him, then flung her head back, all the better to glare up at him, and jabbed an index finger into his chest. 

“Listen, pal,” Darcy said angrily, voice rising. “I have put up with your glowering. I have put up with your total lack of ability to do this job. I have put up with you breaking things because, even though you are truly, truly, beyond terrible at this undercover gig, you’re the Winter Soldier, and-”

“No, I’m not,” he said, unconvincingly, eyes darting from side to side and Darcy rolled hers hard. 

“Yeah? What’s this then?” She snapped sarcastically, rapping smartly on his left arm with the back of her knuckles. The arm, mostly covered by his uniform white shirt, responded with a tinny type sound. 

“War... Injury,” he answered, shifting his weight awkwardly, eyes now fixed on the floor somewhere around her feet, shaggy dark hair hanging in his eyes as his head dropped. Each hand still clung to the broken wood of the mop he’d been clinging to since he’d first set foot inside the store a week ago. 

“No shit,” Darcy said flatly, arms crossing over her chest. 

The man at least had the good grace to look mildly contrite. 

“Listen, pal,” she said with anger coloring every syllable. “We have a rule in this store. And that rule is - you break it, you bought it. Or-” she paused, glancing back over her shoulder at the wreckage again and wincing before she snapped her head back to face him once more. “-in this instance, you total it, you clean it the hell up.”

He looked from her, to the debris, to the shattered pieces of broom he was still gripping tightly. 

“I see that as a you problem,” Darcy responded to the unanswered question. “Time to get creative, soldier.”

With that, she spun on her heel and picked her way over what remained of the storage shelves, cursing loudly when she inadvertently stepped on a bag of Cheetos, which promptly burst with a puff of orange dust. Ducking carefully under the broken door as it dangled from a single hinge, she pulled off the short apron tied around her waist and threw it over her shoulder. 

\---------

“So anyway, that’s how they met, and that’s why the store door has kinda a weird squeak to it when it opens but otherwise it’s pretty good.”

The petite blonde woman blinked slowly, and Luis smiled widely, teeth flashing back at her as he did so. 

“Uh,” she said, the fingers of her left hand absentmindedly tapping on the countertop. “I really just wanted this jar of coffee, but-”

“Good story, though, right?” he continued, apparently oblivious. “I came back from break, I was like, fifteen minutes max dude, I just wanted to go get the new Frappucino off the secret menu at Starbucks ‘cause you know they say that shit isn’t real but it totally is, and the store was like a war-zone. And there was the Winter Soldier all Cinderella style.”

“Mmmhmm,” the woman replied, glancing nervously at the clock hanging on the wall behind the counter, her drumming fingers speeding up slightly. 

“Hands and knees, bro, picking glass out of the sugar-” he noticed her eyes flash to the jar of coffee that he was hanging onto. “Not the coffee! At least, not the caffeine-free stuff.”

“This isn’t caffeine-free,” she said faintly. 

“So Darcy comes back, and she’s all-”

“I’m just going to, to leave, that,” the woman said, pulling away from the counter and hastening to the door, throwing Luis a concerned look over her shoulder before she pulled it open. It squeaked, weirdly.


End file.
